Experience
The Futures Forge Experience
Futures Forge inspires and empowers students to teach themselves, and each other, the skills, capabilities, and tools to understand and lead themselves and others, take responsibility in life and the world, think critically, and solve hard problems. Futures Forge provides objectives and direction, core material, structure, community, guidance and coaching, and a starting framework to build the skills needed to effectively learn quickly: much of the direct learning will come through interactions with fellow students in your section.
Those who choose to join us at Futures Forge understand that the right preparation now can save years of learning the “hard way” throughout one’s life. They don’t want to wait a decade to learn the leadership lessons that most learn from experience, mistakes, and pain. They don’t want to wait until their junior year in college to challenge their ideas of what they want to do with their college education. They want to understand today what learning and study methods work best for them, and reap the rewards forever. If you believe these lessons are of great value, and want to learn them explicitly and rapidly before your college and work careers, then Futures Forge may be for you.
Learn And Live as Adults
Own Your Development
At Futures Forge, you will be free to learn: Futures Forge has no grades or “exams.” You will not perform to meet anyone’s arbitrary standard. You will be inspired to set your own bar, not let your peers down during challenges, to get the most out of every moment, and to grow in pursuit of your personal goals. You will find that this motivates you far more than the pressure of GPA ever did.
You will rapidly master topics of your choosing. You will gravitate towards challenges, rather than be protected from them: learning from both success and setback, you will then with greater confidence take on something harder. You will use the latest tools, including AI, to achieve tasks efficiently, because these are the tools you will use to succeed in the future. You will plan, at your discretion, your college course schedule, your job interview process, or your first startup.
Seize Responsibility
As the Course progresses, the Section will depend less and less on facilitators for instruction. Facilitators will gradually pivot more and more towards coaching, giving feedback and supporting students to drive their progress. Students will increasingly find their sources of key information, define and lead challenges, coach each other’s development, and make their itineraries.
In each location, students will partner with facilitators to plan extracurricular evening and weekend events, working together to create the most incredible experience that they could–or couldn’t yet–imagine.
The Futures Forge Learning Approach
Raif’s Vlog of the Futures Forge Experience
Our learning approach puts our students in charge of their development. We won’t sit you down in a lecture hall and talk to you: this is ineffective. Decades of research have repeatedly shown force multipliers in learning speed and retention when learners have seven Pillars:
Purpose: Understand how what they’re learning will help them directly in their ambitions
Interest: Are intrinsically interested in the topic by developing their motivation and aligning it with what they’re learning
Application: Are immediately applying what they’re learning in active challenges
Tribe: Are supported and challenged by respected peers
Safety: Are safe to experiment, make mistakes, share ideas, and learn through “failure”
Feedback: Are receiving rapid feedback from everyone around them
Accountability: Have the right pressure to “show up” every day.
After one year of learning in this environment, you will find that you are far ahead of your peers at college or work, on your first day. This learning approach is how we teach more in one year than you’ll learn in two years anywhere else: the lessons of modern pedagogical science are behind both what we teach and how we teach it. These principles manifest in our DNA, the code that generates everything we do.
The DNA of Futures Forge
Futures Forge was designed to answer the following question: “If we designed learning and development for top aptitude high school grads today, from a clean sheet, what would it look like?” Centuries of research and practical experience have shown us how intelligent and motivated young adults learn best: we built this understanding into the fabric of Futures Forge. This DNA is the blueprint for both how we design learning experiences, and how our team works.
Facilitators, Mentors, and Teachers
There are 3 categories of people at Futures Forge from whom students learn:
Teachers
who transfer knowledge to students: are the best in the world at their specific topic. Students learn from their videos, MOOCs, books, and other highly prepared materials from the best who put them on there. Futures Forge uses whichever teacher in the world is the best teacher of a given topic.
Mentors
who coach students through growth: have substantial experience leading and operating businesses, and leading/coaching young adults who are early in their careers. They meet frequently with students and facilitators to support progress.
Facilitators
who run the exercises and challenges and live in residence with students: who are deeply trained in our structure, pedagogy, tools for feedback, etc. They have demonstrated intelligence, ethics, and the ability to coach others. Closer in age to the students, able to connect with them and work with them “from where they are now.” They work with and get help from mentors to handle tougher situations.
Is Futures Forge for You?
If you demonstrate top cognitive and psychological potential for excellence, we encourage you to join us. Those who join us and graduate will be more mature, more confident, more capable, and more prepared than their college sophomore peers to excel in all aspects of life--and the comparison won’t be close at all. You’ll start faster, adjust faster, and accelerate through both college and your career faster than those who opted to go straight to college.
Futures Forge is not for you if you are or consider yourself:
Easily upset, agitated, or triggered
Bothered by many points of view from many parts of the world
Paralyzed by global travel and handling the complexities of being in new places
Uninterested in being responsible for your own time
A high degree of drive and responsibility is necessary to thrive at Futures Forge; we recruit for it, and we will expect it from every student. The freedom and reward are exceptional.
Where will you ride your bicycles this weekend? How will you plan dinners around allergies? What topic do you choose to become an expert in for the Expertise module? Who’s leading Tuesday morning’s presentation? All of that is up to you. You’re adults, and Futures Forge will treat you like it.